Weekly WiT (7/26/17): Julia Palmer, Gartner Inc.

Woman in Tech of the Week (7/26/17)

Julia Palmer, Director of Research, Gartner Inc.

The term “Hyperconverged Infrastructure” (called HCI) may bring to mind big metal boxes and hardware stacks. But in fact the hardware is the least important ingredient in integrated systems. The software layer — particularly, Software-Defined Storage — is where differentiation occurs.

Gartner Inc. researchers say that HCI is the fastest-growing segment of the integrated systems market. In fact, it has predicted that the HCI market will reach nearly $5 billion and make up 24 percent of integrated systems sales by 2019. Market leaders like Dell EMC and Nutanix Inc. are increasingly calling attention to HCI’s software layer and its place in multi-cloud.

Palmer’s Gartner colleague, analyst Dave Russell, coined the phrase “compressed differentiation” to characterize the state of storage today. Russell believes that obvious differences in storage software are few and far between now; however, the smaller differences are not negligible. “They can be critical for a particular use case,” Palmer added.

Palmer spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during this year’s Nutanix .NEXT US 2017 in Washington, D.C., about the current state of HCI, as well as its viability in the cloud.